


Small Gods

by coastalredwoods



Category: Star Wars Episode VII: The Force Awakens (2015)
Genre: Blood and Gore, Cannibalism, Folk Religions, Gen, Naboo Culture, horror?? kind of??, meta thinly disguised as fic, technically
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2017-06-10
Updated: 2018-09-18
Packaged: 2018-11-12 06:55:21
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 1,788
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11156607
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/coastalredwoods/pseuds/coastalredwoods
Summary: There is more to the galaxy than just Dark and Light.





	1. Elders

Rey buys the bird from a vendor on Corellia. It’s already dead, but that can’t be helped–everything’s so _clean_ here, so prepared, so _prefabricated_. They kill your poultry for you and sell it wrapped in silky red twine that people would be wearing as personal ornamentation on Jakku. The bird swinging limply from her hands is better fed than she ever was in her first nineteen years of life.

 

“Are you quite sure about this?” Mr. Kenobi asks, as Rey kneels in the wet grass outside the city and pulls out her knife. She can’t see his face, but she can hear the frown in his voice as he continues, “a Jedi does not–“

 

“Oh, sod off,” Rey says, settling a small plastic bowl on the ground. “You don’t have to be here, you know.”

 

A sigh. “I am _concerned_ about your casual attitude towards blood rites.”

 

Another unexpected thing: the Jedi are _idiots_.

 

“Mr. Kenobi,” she says, twisting around to glare up at him. “I am trying to do something beneficial for the galaxy here, and if you can’t be helpful you could at _least_ be silent.”

 

He sighs. “You really are too much like Anakin.”

 

Rey rolls her eyes. There is some sort of ongoing tension between Mr. Kenobi and Anakin, whatever either of them says to the contrary. Apparently murdering children, collapsing the Republic, and then being set on fire are all cause for some fraying of interpersonal relations. 

 

Not her concern. Not right now. And Mr. Kenobi might be kind and patient and all the rest of it, but he doesn’t know the first thing about Jakku.

 

She slits the hen’s throat and lets the blood spill into the bowl. She watches, almost hypnotized, as the dark liquid pools under the moonlight. All the while, she is singing under her breath, each line carefully memorized, each word as precise as the knife carving its way through the throat of a bird, as sacred as sandstorms or sunlight. The old woman who taught it to her had been taught the words in turn by her own mother, and by her mother before that, all the way back to the days when the moon walked the desert in the form of a woman and the sky flowed along the dunes like a river of light.

 

The Elder takes shape out of the darkness all at once. Their hands are the color of old wood. They tilt their head up–Rey hears Mr. Kenobi’s sharp intake of breath–and then dip it down again to lap at the blood in the bowl. There is a long silence in which the only sound is of the Elder’s hungry gulping and a low hum of traffic from the city. Rey hardly dares to breathe.

 

_Greetings, daughter,_ the Elder says at last. Their sandblasted teeth still drip blood as they smile warmly at her. _And a good feast you’ve given me. What is it you wish to know?_

 

Rey stands tall, ignores Mr. Kenobi’s disapproving _tsk_ , and calls to mind the stories they told at dusk in the market square.

 

“Grandparent,” she begins, just like all the other brave girls before her, “I seek your wisdom. I seek the true name of Snoke.”

 


	2. A Needful Thing

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Naboo is full of hidden roads.

There are roads under the water. Agné has mapped them all with her feet, and her mother’s hand in hers. There's always muck under their toes when they step out onto solid ground–a rich, smelly muck of old leaves and rotted lilies that Agné is picking out from under her toenails for the next week.

 

“A long time ago, when invaders came,” her mother’s voice is as clear now as it was then, and Agné can still feel the lap of water at her ankles, and hear the roar of insects in the marsh. “The Naboo retreated into the reeds and took refuge with the Gungans.”

 

“I thought Queen Padmé–“

 

“Theed never made peace with the people of the water,” her mother told her, a faint note of disdain creeping into her voice. “We did. Remember that. Remember the roads.”

 

“Why?” The Republic had returned. The Emperor was dead. Surely there was no need for underwater causeways and desperate midnight escapes.

 

Her mother didn’t answer for a moment, but her hand tightened around Agné’s own. Agné, who was ten and afraid of nothing, felt a chill. She wriggled closer, tucking herself under her mother’s arm.

 

“Just in case,” her mother said. She patted Agné’s hair. “Just in case, little bird. If you ever have need.”

 

The First Order comes to the village of Nerys in the second year of the war. They expect to find an ally of Luke Skywalker’s, fled here from Coruscant, holding important information about the scavenger girl with the Force at her fingertips. But all they find are the burned husks of buildings, and a serene stretch of marsh that hums with small and insignificant life.

 

“Someone must have helped them escape,” Hux spits.

 

“Or perhaps,” Supreme Leader Ren murmurs, “your sources were not as trustworthy as you thought.”

 

Hux would dearly like to commit regicide, in that moment. But he is a cowardly man at heart, and so instead, he bites his tongue until he tastes blood and reminds himself that galactic tyrants tend to die violently, while their underlings survive to carry on the important work of Empire.

 

He is very much looking forward to seeing Ren die violently.

 

“We will burn Theed to the ground,” he says. “It will be an important lesson for the Naboo–“

 

“No.”

 

Perhaps, Hux thinks, the scavenger will push Ren down a reactor shaft.

 

“Supreme Leader,” he says. “The example–“

 

“–is unnecessary.” Ren sounds smug even through his _absurd_ mask. “Your information was flawed. This entire mission was a waste of time. Pray that I do not make an example of _you_.”

 

There was a Sith who was cut clean in half, Hux reminds himself, as he stalks back to the ship. And a Sith who lost his head. Perhaps, if he is very fortunate, Ren will suffer both at once.

 

(Leia told her son about the causeways of southern Naboo, excited at the idea of an ancient resistance to tyranny. But Ben, ever fascinated by Senator Palpatine’s speeches, the ceremonial swords of centuries gone, and the awful splendor of the palace at Theed, does not remember a single thing about them.)


	3. The Giant's Heart

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> This is a story.

There is a boy, once.

 

No. There _was_ a boy. He was the runt of the family, a pale shadow beside his seven vibrant sisters, and he lived on a planet with a name he no longer remembers in a sector of space that is still blank on most maps of the galaxy. His people still believed that their world was the axis around which all the shining stars revolved. When he left, a whole hemisphere was in total darkness, no electric lights to be found.

 

When he’s feeling contemplative, he allows himself to wonder if that’s changed. If he returned, though, nobody would know him. It’s been millennia, after all.

 

There was a boy. And there was a wise old woman, too, and there was a story, told at dusk in a village that no longer exists on a marsh that has long since given way to meadow.

 

_Listen! Once there young warrior named Ren, son of Thryn, son of Sana, son of Jorik the Ætheling. His father had died in battle when he was a babe in arms, and he was raised by a wealthy lord, rich in gold but poor in children, who loved him as his own son. Now, every night the lord played music in the hall, and the people danced. That music roused a giant, and he rose from the swamps, wrinkled by age and malice, eyes gleaming like two stones in his withered head. He walked the moors, softly, softly, until he came to the great hall filled with light._

 

There is the rest. He knows it. And in the tongue of his childhood it is poetry, it babbles forth like the stream where the snoke fish spawned and his mother made offerings to the spirits. In moments of weakness, he murmurs it. These last remnants of his boyhood.

 

_And the giant tore down the hall, and he burned it. For his heart was wounded by the sounds of merriment, and the joy of the great lord within caused him as much pain as a warrior’s wound._

 

He was sixteen summers’ when the ship crashed on the moor. He walked out to it, softly, softly, barefoot and clutching his spear. The creature that came out was a monster–red-skinned, with spikes all over its face. It snarled at him, and a blade of light sprang to its hand.

 

Fast, yes. But the boy could move between one moment and the next, and he caught the moor-monster between his hands and sank his teeth into its throat.

 

_One survived. The boy Ren, grown to manhood, took up the sword and drove it into the giant’s flesh._

 

Again. And again. The creature flailed, and cried out, and scored its claws down the side of the boy’s face. But the boy had learned at the knee of the village wise woman, who healed with a touch and called down lightning from the sky. This thing was only a very fragile foreign thing, and its blood was black and sweet.

 

_Ren carved out the giant’s heart and ate it. And the giant’s strength became his own. He was more mighty than a dozen men, and as fearless as a dragon, and his mind became cunning in the way of giants._

 

The moor-monster’s heart was as black as its blood. It steamed in the boy’s hands.

 

He ate it. Of course he ate it. That was part of the story, after all. He ate it, and he’s sure that something happened next. But he’s done so much since then, and learned so many forbidden things, that his memories are…obscured.

 

But still, that day: the heart in his hands, in his chest. The taste of blood. Moss under his feet, and the fire of the sky-ship billowing smoke. That day he will never forget.

 

(He had seven sisters. He’s sure that they must have had names. And the hero of the story is named _Ren_ , or perhaps that was the giant, or perhaps–)

 

What matters, though. What matters is that he won that battle, because he was quick and ruthless and full of magic. That is the moral of the story: win. Do not hesitate. Cut the throat. Eat the heart. There is just you, the boy, and the empty moor, and the monster sent to test your mettle.


End file.
